“Our country may seem like a big magical forest when you approach by plane, but on the ground it’s a big circus of highways, suburban living rooms and bourgeois first world problems.”

It’s true we have beautiful forests and lakes, but do we, the city folks, really enjoy them as well as we could? I used to live in a suburb which was very close to nature, I could even see a small beach and a lake right in front of my apartment window and I would often visit it. But most of the time I was the only one there, and the reason behind it couldn’t have been the lack of people because there sure was several block of flats around there.

“Winter is coming. And it doesn’t bring out the best in people.”

I love finnish summer, people are smiling and the sun doesn’t go down. We spend time outdoors enjoying the warmth and company of our friends with no hurry. Unfortunately this only lasts for a couple months, the rest of the year is quite the opposite.

“It takes over half a century to really open up about war trauma.”

This might seem a bit deep, but I feel like this has something to do with the so called “finnishness” and how we as finns are today. Especially when it comes to strangers, we don’t like to open up about our problems and will rather keep them to ourselves. Perhaps this comes from the era of wars, where we focused on surviving and not complaining about it. Though maybe there is a change already in progress, I would like to see a day where everyone would be more open and nice to each other.

“You’ll feel more at home if you learn to appreciate the empty space between conversations.”

Welcome!

This blog is your window to Finnishness. Here you will find blog posts written by students of Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) describing their personal experiences and notions of being a Finn or living in Finland. This blog is part of the course "Intercultural Experiences and Competences" and was started in spring 2016.

You can use the tag cloud to find posts with specific contents, and to find posts from a specific month, use the navigation at the bottom of the page titled “Blog Post Archive”. Feel free to leave comments as well! Enjoy!